Archives for May 2007

Readers of Online Marketing Blog for the past few months might remember our hosting trials and tribulations with a good but unprepared host and then the less than desirable activities of Pair Networks. We moved to a dedicated server with Minneapolis web site hosting company VISI for hosting OMB and since it’s been over a month I thought I’d give an update.

We currently use VISI for the hosting or our public relations firm web site, email and a dedicated server for Online Marketing Blog along with an array of support.

Last week we ran what turned out to be the single most popular TopRank® Reader Poll ever on favorite SEO podcasts with over 380 votes. It was a tough competition with 4 podcasts running neck and neck, but the winner is the Strike Point podcast with Dave Naylor and Mikkel deMib Svendson. Beginning SEO Podcast (which I did last night) followed in second with Danny Sullivan’s Daily Search Cast in third.

Now for this week’s poll, we’ll turn to another popular source for information on the search marketing industry, email newsletters. Of the many sources of information on search marketing, email continues to be a channel that I use for quick news scans on industry news and particularly for articles.

Tonight I’m recording a Beginning SEO podcast with David Brown and Brian Mark. I’ve known Brian through conferences for the past few years and I met David for the first time at SES New York. We sat next to the stripper pole in Epiar’s party bus (That’s David behind me) on it’s way to the Vintage Tub and Bath dinner party. Luckily for everyone, David and I stayed in our seats and left the dancing to Elisabeth.

I noticed that the first of four podcasts with Barry Schwartz was posted today, where he pointed out many of the forum and online resources he tracks for Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land. Did Barry say 400 plus blogs and sites tracked??? WOW. I don’t know how he does it. I’m sure the assistant helps, but it’s amazing all the same.

While I don’t always have time to read the email newsletters on search marketing and interactive that I find filling up my inbox, there are those moments of RSS reading weakness when I revert to my old email ways. Here are a few articles of interest from today’s search marketing email newsletter crop.

The Death of the Page View – Dave Friedman tells the tale of the dying page view metric over at Chief Marketer, citing AJAX, RSS and widgets as the primary culprits. Funny, it’s those three that are making the web more interesting again. Suggested alternatives include: AJAX metrics and time-based ad serving as well as user-participation metrics such as comments left or number of media submissions. One thing is for sure, social media presents interesting challenges for metrics.

We have several overdue search engine marketing blog additions this week including those for 2 major search engines. The master list of Search Marketing Blogs has been updated. A big thank you to Danny Sullivan as several blogs were gleaned from the well-maintained blogroll over at Search Engine Land.

One of the most common problems with blog posts, email or just life in general is spelling. Sure, everything now has spell check built in, yet it doesn’t stop misspellings. Instead of fighting it, try using it to your advantage.

Names are one of the common misspellings that are easy to do. Did Jordan Sparks win American Idol? No. Jordin Sparks did. However, thousands of people are searching for Jordan and it’s pretty easy to get additional traffic off the minor typo.

Wikipedia also has a rather large list of commonly misspelled words. I bet that a lot of people are searching on quite a few of them and getting frustrated because they can’t get any good results. This is where you could step in.

Along with other forms of media coverage on the topics of search and online marketing, internet radio has been a great source of content for listening live or via podcast. Some SEO podcasts and online radio are basic and others are very professionally produced. The content varies greatly as well from industry gossip to practical tactics.

Earlier this week I ran an informal poll with about 40 respected search marketers and almost half admitted they didn’t listen to podcasts much, if at all. In fact, some were publishers of podcasts that didn’t listen to other podcasts. Is is it the case that these people were so busy with clients, speaking, writing, testing that they didn’t have time?

So guess what happens when you post to fast and don’t read all the details? You feel like an idiot. 🙂

One of my biggest complaints about Technorati is that I love blog search, but don’t need all the social media elements. Photos, audio and video just aren’t want I want to see. I wrote that the new Technorati is nice, but to over done for me. Guess what, they already knew that people felt that way and built a striped own version.

Technorati is nothing but blog search. Quick, uncluttered and simple. A big thanks goes out to the Technorati crew for this!

Now the only thing that Google still has is the ability to search by date (past hour, day, week, month, custom) and yet sort by relevance or date. But now I guess I’m just being picky. 😉

I’ve been a big fan of Technorati since the beginning, but once it tried to become the ‘one stop shop’ for social media search, I’ve strayed. I don’t care about videos, pictures and audio. I really want just a good blog search. So I switched to Google Blog Search. With the new design though, my want to use Technorati is coming back.

One big reasons for leaving, other than all the extra social stuff, was that when I subscribed to an RSS feed, it kept telling me the some post was new every time I checked my feeds. I haven’t signed up for any new Technorati feeds lately as Google Blog Search has that down.

“titel” is “title” in German for you spell check enthusiasts.
Via Axandra Search Engine Facts newsletter, German company SISTRIX (translated link) has conducted a study of 10,000 random keywords and then analyzed the top 100 Google search results for each keyword to determine which page elements offered the most influence on rankings.

Nothing in the analysis will be new to long time search marketers, but since so many people new to search engine optimization ask for nice, concise lists of what’s important to rank well in the search engines, I thought I’d indulge.

Keywords in the title tag

Targeted keywords in the body tag

Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don’t seem to have an effect.

When I was at the Search Insider Summit a few weeks ago, there was a panel on video search optimization. One of the panel participants was Christy Tanner from TV Guide. It was interesting to learn about how most video search works and that there is a distinction between video hosted search and video search. The latter uses thumbnails and meta data for videos and points to wherever the actual videos are hosted.

TV Guide now offers an online video guide that distinguishes itself from other online video search by focusing on professionally produced video content such as, movie trailers, TV shows, news clips, previews and programs across all genres and networks. Without consumer generated content, the TV Guide video search site makes it easier to find popular TV programming.